Mystification and Triumphalism

Why the left can't handle the truth about social conservatism.

By

James Taranto

February 21, 2012

Social liberals have two basic approaches to social conservatism: mystification and triumphalism. Both reflect a failure of understanding--but more than that, an incapacity to understand, a will to ignorance that is best understood as a psychological defense.

For an example of mystification, let's look at a recent column by former Enron adviser Paul Krugman. He ponders the question of why Republican states tend to have higher levels of government dependency--as measured by the percentage of aggregate personal income that comes from transfer payments--than Democratic ones. One possibility he doesn't consider is that the measure is flawed--that there are more and richer rich people in blue states like California, Connecticut, New Jersey and New York, skewing the percentage downward.

Still, it's generally accepted that working-class voters are more socially conservative than affluent ones, and that at least among whites that shows up at the ballot box as support for Republicans. Here's Krugman's effort to make sense of the phenomenon:

Why do regions that rely on the safety net elect politicians who want to tear it down? I've seen three main explanations.

First, there is Thomas Frank's thesis in his book "What's the Matter With Kansas?": working-class Americans are induced to vote against their own interests by the G.O.P.'s exploitation of social issues. And it's true that, for example, Americans who regularly attend church are much more likely to vote Republican, at any given level of income, than those who don't.

Still, as Columbia University's Andrew Gelman points out, the really striking red-blue voting divide is among the affluent: High-income residents of red states are overwhelmingly Republican; high-income residents of blue states only mildly more Republican than their poorer neighbors. Like Mr. Frank, Mr. Gelman invokes social issues, but in the opposite direction. Affluent voters in the Northeast tend to be social liberals who would benefit from tax cuts but are repelled by things like the G.O.P.'s war on contraception.

Finally, Cornell University's Suzanne Mettler points out that many beneficiaries of government programs seem confused about their own place in the system. She tells us that 44 percent of Social Security recipients, 43 percent of those receiving unemployment benefits, and 40 percent of those on Medicare say that they "have not used a government program."

Starting at the end, it seems to us that the source of confusion is the wording of Mettler's question, specifically the word "used," which suggests a volitional action. Workers have no choice but to participate in the programs Krugman cites, and Social Security and Medicare have always been marketed, somewhat misleadingly, as an even trade: You pay now for benefits later. If someone who gets a Social Security check is "using" a government program, then so is someone who gets a tax refund. Mettler should have asked her survey subjects if they had received benefits from a government program.

Let's give Krugman a modicum of credit for acknowledging the Gelman point, which is the flip side of the Frank argument. But note the tendentious way in which he presents the two parallel arguments. Why not say the Democrats are "exploiting" social issues to persuade wealthy blue-staters to vote against their own interests, while less-affluent red-staters are voting Republican on principle because they're "repelled" by social liberalism? Because it's psychologically reassuring, even if intellectually lazy, to describe one's opponents as fools.

Krugman at least is sufficiently tethered to reality to acknowledge social conservatism as a political force. Not so Jonathan Alter, who concludes a recent Bloomberg column by crowing: "The culture wars are over, and the Republicans lost."

This is based on no more than a series of unproven assumptions. Our favorite is his analysis of Planned Parenthood's recent smear campaign against Susan G. Komen for the Cure:

At first, the Komen case looked like just another example of anti-abortion activists flexing their muscles against hapless women's health advocates. Then came a furious, highly effective counterassault fueled by liberal social media, a new counterweight to conservative talk radio in defining the terms of debate. The outcome of that flap, in which the Komen foundation reversed itself and apologized, shows that bashing Planned Parenthood may work in Republican primaries but will be poison in the general election.

Whatever one's opinion of the merits and politics of the kerfuffle, the idea that it predicts anything at all about voter behavior in November is a bizarre non sequitur.

Among Alter's other unproven assumptions: that the Catholic Church's defense of religious liberty vis-à-vis ObamaCare's contraception mandate is "no longer plausible," that "the firestorm" over that issue "may prove to be a political blessing" for the president, that President Obama would best Rick Santorum in a debate over the subject, that Sen. Scott Brown's support for conscience exemptions to the ObamaCare mandate will "probably boomerang on" him, and that "independent women" side with the president.

Unlike Krugman, Alter thinks social conservatives are few--numerous enough, conveniently, only to lead the Republican Party astray and help re-elect Obama. But Krugman and Alter are united in viewing social conservatives as fools. Alter describes them as "the spiritual and political descendants of Protestants who founded the Know Nothing Party in the 1850s on anti-Papist ideas." Here he veers into mystification, puzzling over why they would back Santorum, a devout Catholic. It never occurs to Alter that he may simply have pegged them wrong.

In our Weekend Interview, Jeffrey Bell, author of "The Case for Polarized Politics: Why America needs Social Conservatism," offers an alternative explanation for the phenomenon that mystifies Krugman:

"Middle America does have more children than elite America, and they vote socially conservative, even though they might not necessarily be behaving that way in their personal life. They may be overwhelmed by the sexual revolution and its cultural impacts."

Mr. Bell squares that circle by arguing that social conservatism is "aspirational" and "driven by a sense in Middle America that the kind of cultural atmosphere we have, the kind of incentives, the example set by government, is something that has to be pushed back against."

In other words, less affluent Americans are socially conservative because they bear the brunt of the social policies and cultural attitudes that prevail among affluent liberal elites. You can see why it would be difficult for Krugman and Alter, who doubtless pride themselves on their compassion and moral rectitude, to acknowledge or even consider this explanation. They need to be obtuse as a psychological defense.

ENLARGE

"Women March for Equality" in New York: It's not 1971 anymore.
Bettmann/CORBIS

Their age may have something to do with it, too. Krugman and Alter were both born in the 1950s, which is to say that they are both baby boomers. Both were too young to be protesting on campus in 1968, but both are old enough that the triumph of contemporary feminism and the sexual revolution coincided with their formative years. That is to say, both presumably cast their lot with the cultural left in its moment of triumph and in the belief that by doing so, they were putting themselves on the side of progress.

That was an understandable thing for them to believe given the times and what one assumes were their predispositions. But while feminism and the sexual revolution have been great for high-status men like Krugman and Alter (full disclosure: and this columnist), and for those women who place a high value on professional careers, things have not worked out so well for those who are less privileged.

That is a truth so undeniable that it can even slip past the editorial filters at the New York Times. Over the weekend the paper published a news story with the shocking statistic that "more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage." The article cites "the pill" as one of "the forces rearranging the family." When Rick Santorum makes the same common-sense observation, the cultural left (which includes some on the center-right, as we noted Thursday) falsely denounces him as a religious nut looking to snatch your prophylactics.

If liberal baby boomers stubbornly refuse to see the damage that their idea of "progress" has wrought, what about younger generations, for whom the sexual revolution was an inheritance, not a choice, and therefore perhaps not an essential component of personal identity, even among those on the left? Suzanne Venker, niece and co-author of the great antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly, is pessimistic, based on her reading of recent articles by two 40ish feminists:

In the widely read November 2011 Atlantic cover story, entitled "All the Single Ladies," singleton Kate Bolick declares that "it's time to embrace new ideas about romance and family--and to acknowledge the end of traditional marriage as society's highest ideal." . . .

Bolick's "All the Single Ladies"--which has been "recommended" 51,000 times on Facebook--is being made into a television series. So now the young people of America will get this message crammed down their throats every week. That should make for some good partnerships down the road, don't you think?

Indeed, Bolick is in good company--not just with Hollywood but with like-minded pontificators such as Hanna Rosin, who wrote a similar article last year called "The End of Men"--also in The Atlantic, and also widely read. The online version of this article incorporates a video in which Rosin (and her daughter) conclude, while sitting at a table opposite her son and (very emasculated) husband, that "girls are better than boys."

We see it differently. Having read the two Atlantic pieces, we find reason for encouragement in both. It's true that Rosin's video is deeply disturbing: Why would a woman publicly humiliate not only her husband but her young son in such a manner? And the tone of her article is obnoxiously triumphalist. Rosin enjoys spiking the football (or whatever girls spike) to celebrate women's rising status relative to men.

Yet she does acknowledge that the unbalancing of relations between the sexes has produced social problems:

It is fabulous to see girls and young women poised for success in the coming years. But allowing generations of boys to grow up feeling rootless and obsolete is not a recipe for a peaceful future. Men have few natural support groups and little access to social welfare; the men's-rights groups that do exist in the U.S. are taking on an angry, antiwoman edge. Marriages fall apart or never happen at all, and children are raised with no fathers. Far from being celebrated, women's rising power is perceived as a threat.

If the middle three sentences of that paragraph are accurate, then so is the perception Rosin describes in the last sentence. It is a good sign that a left-wing feminist like Rosin can acknowledge the problem.

As for Bolick, her agenda seems to be therapeutic more than political. At age 29, she dumped a boyfriend--who was, in her telling, a perfectly decent, attractive guy--because "something was missing." A decade later, she realizes that her expectations were unrealistic and her prospects of marriage are slim.

Now she wants society to change in order to assist her in rationalizing away her regret. "The single woman is very rarely seen for who she is--whatever that might be--by others, or even by the single woman herself, so thoroughly do most of us internalize the stigmas that surround our status," she complains. That's not politics, it's self-absorption.

Here is a prediction: Even if Rick Santorum is not the next president, and even if Barack Obama crushes him in the general election (the latter, though not the former, is a big if), social conservatism will continue to grow in size and importance over the next couple of decades. That is to say, if Santorum loses, it will be in part because he is ahead of his time.

The social dislocation caused by feminism and the sexual revolution demands a political response, and so far the left has nothing to offer apart from bankrupting the country with more entitlements. It's encouraging to see a youngish left-wing feminist like Rosin have an inkling that there's a problem, but until the left starts thinking creatively about solutions, which will require a reconsideration of orthodoxies that date back to the 1960s and '70s, the social right will be the only game in town.

GINGRICH: "Having become deeply involved in GM's operation, the federal government has a vested interest in the company's success. So what is stopping it from requiring all Americans--under threat of penalty--to buy a GM car?"--In his book "A Nation Like No Other," published last summer.

THE FACTS: This is called Newt being Newt.

There was a time when one could describe the AP's work as "news being news." Nowadays they're like a cheap knockoff of Maureen Dowd.

At the beginning of 2012, I received an anonymous document in the mail describing what appeared to be details of the Heartland Institute's climate program strategy. . . . I attempted to confirm the accuracy of the information in this document. In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else's name.

Why did he do it? Things got a little out of hand. It's just this war and that lying son of a bitch, Johnson:

My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts -- often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated -- to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved.

We always knew global warming was a scam, but we didn't realize till now that it's an identity-theft scam.

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